Memoranda relating to the "discovery of anaesthesia"

MEMORANDA RELATING TO THE “ DISCOV
ERY OF ANESTHESIA.”

America has accorded but few public honors to medi¬
cal students, to physicians, or to dentists. But when, in
the due fulness of time and after mature consideration,
a public honor, such as has recently fallen to the lot of
the late Dr. W. T. G. Morton, “ the discoverer of the safe
use of ether,” at last occurs, it would seem worthy of
being noted in connection with the event which led up
to it, by the medical press. We refer to the enrolment
of Dr. Morton’s name upon the base of the dome in the
new chamber of the House of Representatives in the State
House in Boston, among the selected fifty three of
Massachusetts’ most lamous citizens. It will be noted in
the quotation from the Critic, given below, that “ the
names have been selected in such a way that each shall
either mark an epoch or designate a man who has turned
the course of events.”

The following accounts, from the Boston Transcript
of November io, 1894, and from the Critic, of New
York, of November 17, 1894, give the main features of
this event.

“Most Distinguished Citizens1 — The Fifty -three
whose Names are Inscribed in the New House of Rep
resentatives. — The names of the fifty-three celebrated
sons of Massachusetts have been selected by the State
House Commissioners and are inscribed around the base
of the dome of the new chamber of the House of Rep¬
resentatives. They are Morse, Morton, Bell, Ban¬
croft, Prescott, Motley, Parkman, Emerson, Hawthorne,
Holmes, Bryant, Longfellow, Lowell, Whittier, Copley,
Hunt, Edwards, Channing, Brooks, Carver, Bradford,
Endicott, Winthrop, Vane, Pickering, Knox, Lincoln,
John Adams, Dane, Quincy, J. Q. Adams, Web¬
ster, Sumner, Wilson, Andrew, Choate, Parsons, Shaw,
Story, Everett, Phillips, Garrison, Mann, Howe, Allen,
Devens, Bartlett, Putnam, Franklin, Bowditch, Pierce,

Acrassiv.. TtnlfinrVi

“A few of the names may not be quite familiar. Bell
is, of course, the inventor of the telephone. He is the
only man still living who has been included. Morton
was the discoverer of anaesthesia. Knox and Lincoln
were the Revolutionary major generals. Dane drafted
the ordinance of 1787, and originated the clause in the
constitution forbidding the impairment of the obligation
of contracts. Quincy was the president of Harvard.
Allen was an eminent judge. Howe was the tutor of
Laura Bridgman and the revolutionizer of the methods
of teaching the blind. Putnam settled the northwest
territory. ’ ’

Boston Letter.2 — “ The fifty three * Immortals ’ of
Massachusetts have been selected. In other words, upon
the base of the dome in the chamber of the House of
Representatives in the new State House will be inscribed
the names of fifty- three sons of Massachusetts selected as
representing the highest fame of the commonwealth.
Some names, according to Senator Hoar, deserving to
go in this list will have to be omitted for lack of room,
but, as Lieutenant Governor Wolcott says, the list has
been approved by the Governor and his council, and the
names have been selected in such a way that each shall
either mark an epoch or designate a man who has
turned the course of events. Probably the selection,
taken altogether, will be regarded as just. In that list
stand Prescott, Motley and Parkman. There, too, are
Emerson, Hawthorne, Holmes, Bryant, Longfellow,
Lowell and Whittier, while Carver, Bradford, Endicott,
Winthrop, Vane, Pickering, Knox, Lincoln, John Adams,
John Quincy Adams and Quincy are among the early
patriots thus honored. Howe, the husband of Julia Ward
Howe, the great worker for the blind, and tutor of Laura
Bridgman ; Morton, who discovered the safe use of
ether, Copley, Hunt, Edwards, Channing, Brooks and
Morse are also there, together with the great statesmen,
Webster, Sumner, Wilson, Andrew, Choate, Everett,
Phillips and Garrison. Among the later names are those

1 From the Boston Transcript, Boston, Mass., Saturday, November
10, 1894.

2 From The Critic, New York City, November 17, 1894.

t;

of Devens, Bowditch, Pierce and Agassiz, while Bell, the
inventor of the telephone, is the only man still living
who is included in the list. These names will indicate
the general drift of the selection.”

And in this connection it is believed that the two ac¬
companying letters from Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes,
one of them of recent date, and both published in the
New York Medical Record of December 22, 1894, in
the following communication will be of interest.

“ORIGIN OF THE TERM ANESTHETIC.”

To the Editor of the Medical Record.

Sir : I notice, in your issue of December 8th, an ac¬
count of a conversation upon this point, between Mr.
Edgar Willett and Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes, when
the latter was in England, in 1886.

It is quite possible that Dr. Holmes had forgotten that
he had, in 1846, written to Dr. Morton a letter elaborately
analyzing the varied appropriateness of several terms, and
I take pleasure in sending to you from among my father’s
correspondence a copy of Dr. Holmes’s original letter,
exactly corroborative of the conversation above referred
to. Dr. Holmes’s letter reads as follows :

“ Boston, November 21, 1846.

“ My Dear Sir : Everybody wants to have a hand in
a great discovery. All I will do is to give you a hint
or two, a$_to names, or the name, to be applied to the
state produced and the agent.

“The state should, I think, be called ‘ anaesthesia. ’
This signifies insensibility, more particularly (as used by
Linmeus and Cullen) to objects of touch. (See ‘ Good-
Nosology,’ p. 259.) The adjective will be ‘ anaesthetic.’

“ Thus we might say the state of anaesthesia, or the
anaesthetic state. The means employed would be prop¬
erly called the anti- aesthetic agent. Perhaps it might be
allowable to say anaesthetic agent, but this admits of
question.

“ The words antineuric. aneuric. neuro leptic, neuro-
lepsia, neuro etasis, etc., seem too anatomical; whereas
the change is a physiological one. I throw them out for
consideration.

“ I would have a name pretty soon, and consult some
accomplished scholar, such as President Everett or Dr.
Bigelow, Senior, before fixing upon the terms, which will
be repeated by the tongues of every civilized race of man-
hind.

“You could mention these words which I suggest for
their consideration ; but there may be others more ap¬
propriate and agreeable. Yours respectfully,

“ O. W. Holmes.

“ Dr. Morton.”

When the child now known as anaesthesia had been
born into the world by the public demonstration of a
painless capital operation at the Massachusetts General
Hospital, October 16, 1846, it had no name, and none
could be immediately found for it, since the language
of the day had not as yet been called upon to express
the act or the state produced by the act. It was neces¬
sary to christen it. Accordingly, a meeting was held at
the house of Dr. A. A. Gould, at which were present
Dr. Henry J. Bigelow, Dr. O. W. Holmes, and Dr.
Morton, and Dr. Gould read aloud a list of names which
he had prepared. On hearing the word “ Letheon,”
Dr. Morton exclaimed, “ That is the name the discov¬
ery shall be christened.” Dr. Gould and the others also
favored this name, derived from the mythological river
Lethe. But after a subsequent consultation with Dr.
Holmes and a consideration of the terms suggested by
him in the above letter, Dr. Morton adopted the terms
amesthesia, anaesthetics, and etherization, the terms now
in common use.

While upon this subject it may interest your readers to
read another letter of Dr. Holmes’s, written forty- seven
years later on — in fact, only a few months before his
death — wherein no failure of his vigor or felicity of ex¬
pression is wanting. This letter, now in the possession
of the writer, has been published only in part, in the
August number of the Century Magazine of the present

year, in an article entitled “ Dr. Morton’s Discovery of
Anaesthesia.” It reads as follows :

“ Boston, April 2, 1893.

“ My Dear Sir : Few persons have or had better rea¬
son than myself to assert the claim of Dr. Morton to the
introduction of artificial anaesthesia into surgical prac¬
tice. The discovery was formally introduced to the
scientific world in a paper read before the American
Academy of Arts and Sciences by Dr. Henry J. Bigelow,
one of the first, if not the first, of American surgeons.

“ On the evening before the reading of the paper con¬
taining the announcement of the discovery, Dr. Bigelow
called at my office to recite this paper to me. He pref¬
aced it with a few words which could never be forgotten.

“ He told me that a great discovery had been made,
and its genuineness demonstrated at the Massachusetts
General Hospital, of which he was one of the surgeons.
This was the production of insensibility to pain during
surgical operations, by the inhalation of a certain vapor
(the same afterward shown to be that of sulphuric ether).
In a very short time, he said, this discovery will be all
over Europe. He had taken a great interest in the al¬
leged discovery, had been present at the first capital
operation performed under its influence, and was from
the first the adviser and supporter of Dr. W. T. G. Mor¬
ton, who had induced the surgeons of the hospital to
make trial of the means by which he proposed to work
this new miracle. The discovery went all over the world
like a conflagration.

“ The only question was whether Morton got advice
from Dr. Charles T. Jackson, the chemist, which entitled
that gentleman to a share, greater or less, in the merit
of the discovery.

“ Later it was questioned whether he did not owe his
first hint to Dr. Horace Wells, of Hartford, which need
not be disputed. Both these gentlemen deserve * hon¬
orable mention ’ in connection with the discovery, but
I have never a moment hesitated in awarding the essen¬
tial credit of the great achievement to Dr. Morton.

This priceless gift to humanity went forth from the
operating theatre of the Massachusetts General Hospital
and the man to whom the world owes it is Dr. William
Thomas Green Morton.

“ Experiments have been made with other substances
besides sulphuric ether, for the production of anaesthesia.
Among them, by far the most important, is chloroform,
the use of which was introduced by Sir James Y. Simp¬
son. For this and for the employment of anaesthetics in
midwifery he should have all due credit, but his attempt
to appropriate the glory of making the great and immor¬
tal discovery, as revealed in his contribution to the Eighth
edition of the ‘ Encyclopaedia Britannica,’ is unworthy
of a man of his highly respectable position. In the
Ninth edition of the same work his article ‘ Chloroform ’
is omitted and a fair enough account of the discovery is
given under the title ‘ Ancesthesia .’

“ Yours very truly, O. W. Holmes.”

“P. S. — You had better apply to Dr. Richard M.
Hodges for his recent paper on the subject if you have
not seen it already.”

I am, yours very truly,

William J. Morton, M D

New York Citv, December 15, 1894.

William Thomas Green Morton, M.D., medical stu¬
dent, dentist and physician, and the recent recipient of
Massachusetts’ honor, was born in Charlton, Mass., Au¬
gust 9, 1819, and died, aged forty eight, in New York
City, July 15, 1868.1

In 1840, at the age of twenty-one, he was a student in
the “ Baltimore College of Dental Surgery,” a chartered
organization connected with the Washington University
of Medicine of Baltimore.

Subsequently he engaged in the practice of dentistry

■See the American Cyclopaedia: New York, D. Appleton & Co.,
1875. Article, “ Morton, W. T. G.,” p. 855. See Encyclopaedia Bri¬
tannica. Ninth Edition, Article, “Anaesthesia.” See the Century
Illustrated Monthly Magazine, New York City, August, 1894.

in Boston, in the meantime assiduously pursuing his
studies to receive a medical degree.

. March 20, 1844, he entered his name as a student of
medicine with Dr. Charles T. Jackson of Boston.

In November, 1844, he entered the Harvard Medical
School in Boston in regular course as a matriculate and
attended all the lectures.

In 1852 he received the honorary degree of Doctor of
Medicine from his original alma mater , the Washing¬
ton University of Medicine (afterwards merged into the
College of Physicians and Surgeons), of Baltimore, Md.

On September 30, 1 846, at his office in Boston, he ad¬
ministered sulphuric ether to Eben Frost and extracted
a tooth without pain to the patient.

Securing permission from Dr. John C. Warren, Senior
Surgeon of the Massachusetts General Hospital, on Oc¬
tober 16, 1846, he administered ether to a patient at the
hospital, and Dr. Warren performed a severe surgical
operation, the patient remaining unconscious during the
operation.

He was now twenty-seven years of age and still a medi¬
cal student in the Harvard Medical School. The discov¬
ery now announced, brought with it overwhelming
labors, and he was compelled to discontinue his studies
from that moment onward.

From this crucial demonstration in October, 1846,
dates the immediate and universal adoption of the prac¬
tice of amesthesia throughout the civilized world. The
event marked the advent of a new epoch in the world’s
history, namely the epoch of practical painless surgery.

Over Dr. Morton’s grave in Mount Auburn Cemetery,
near Boston, a monument has been “ erected by citizens
of Boston” including names the most respected and
most honored among them, bearing the following inscrip¬
tion, written by the late Dr. Jacob Bigelow, of Boston :

“ William T. G. Morton,

INVENTOR AND REVEALER OF AN/ESTHETIC INHALATION.

BY WHOM PAIN IN SURGERY WAS AVERTED AND
ANNULLED.

BEFORE WHOM, IN ALL TIME, SURGERY WAS AGONY.

SINCE WHOM SGTF.NGF WAS, CONTROL OF PATN.”

A monument in the Public Gardens in Boston is
erected “ To commemorate the discovery that the inhala¬
tion of ether causes insensibility to pain. First proved
to the world at the Massachusetts General Hospital, in
Boston, October, 1846,” the date of Dr. Morton’s suc¬
cessful demonstration at the hospital.

No other date is upon this monument except the date
of its erection, 1867, and no other reference, except bib
lical quotations, to anaesthesia. It can therefore refer to
no one but to Dr. Morton.

Dr. Morton received a divided Montyon prize from
the French Academy of Sciences, the “ Cross of the
Order of Wasa, Sweden and Norway,” the “Cross of
the Order of St. Vladimir, Russia,” and a silver box
containing one thousand dollars from the trustees of the
Massachusetts General Hospital “in honor of the ether
discovery of September 30, 1846.” The trustees in their
report, subsequently reaffirmed, unanimously according
the honor and credit of the discovery to him.

He made several appeals for remuneration, for the use
of his discovery in the army and navy, to the Congress of
the United States, and although committees to whom
the subject was referred made majority reports that he
was entitled “ to the merit of the discovery and to sub¬
stantial reward,” yet no reward was ever voted to him.
At two sessions of Congress, bills in his favor were
passed, and on one occasion the President of the United
States held his pen in his hand to sign a bill and paused
to consult Jefferson Davis, Secretary of War, with the
result that the bill was never signed.

Announcing his discovery at the age of twenty seven
and dying at the comparatively early age of forty- eight,
his twenty one years of adult and active life were en¬
tirely consumed with the turmoil and pain of the con¬
troversy forced upon him by claims not one of which had
ever appeared in print until after his initial announce¬
ment in 1846.

He died poor and

“ He became poor in a cause which has made the world
his debtor .”